Are you against standards, committees, or just progress? The inefficiency of US digital infrastructure is ludicrous, and as the threat of energy depletion nears, many groups will put squabbling aside and adopt useful conventions.

I worked on the committee that adopted the standard bar code for the book publishing industry. It took a lot of meetings, but it happened. The American economy is hobbled by grossly inadequate efficiency of information transfer across systems and organizations. The remedy is obvious: Federal leadership in digital information interchange standardization.

There is nothing magical about facing the "pressures and problems of a corporation," twitchy, 90-day profit horizon thinking is what has brought us to a low-reliability, Balkanized, incompatible commercial software environment, where each MS Windows upgrade is dreaded rather than welcomed.

Problem defined:

No Federal Government leadership in setting national technology policy in:

- Broadband rollout
- Medical care automation
- Distance learning
- Electronic voting
- Consumer protection
- Energy efficiency

Standards are not just set by industry. Government and non-profit players have an enormous role. That is where the Internet standards came from.

The beginning of US national manufacturing standards was the US Navy's standardization of screw threads around the turn of the century. Until then, there were many physically incompatible standards for threaded fasteners.

There is no good reason whatsoever why the USA does not have a universal standard electronic format for the data in a patient's medical history. This one step would open the way for billions of dollars in savings. There are many other areas where Federal IT standards could save huge amounts while improving product and service quality.

He would set standards for the digital commerce and government of the United States. Have you visited a doctor's office lately and admired the paper files? How many times a month do you have to write down your SSN?

One man's "ideology" (e.g., fluoridation of drinking water) is another man's public health. The US economy is crippled by gratuitously differentiated "standards" in almost every sector. A Federal CTO could begin to change that.

The Obama administration may be the place where the driving of the golden spike uniting open source development with open source government takes place. Using Federal IT standards to drive proprietary formats out of the government departments will create a cascade of rationalization and standardization throughout the US economy. Our creaky and costly medical care system desperately needs this kind of rationalization.

Accordingly, a prominent and effective member of the Open Source community should occupy this position, not a big-time software corporatist.

Yes, imagine what a paradise we would live in if we had only been exposed to forced migration to the latest Microsoft products at three month intervals. We could even rent time on Microsoft's much cooler version of the Internet.